


written in love's richest books

by potted_music



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Crossdressing, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 08:36:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15287811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potted_music/pseuds/potted_music
Summary: An amateur staging ofA Midsummer Night's Dreamproves a good way to lift some of the tedium of the ships' early days frozen in the ice, and Peglar is intent to make his own entertainment. All in all, the expedition was fun, until it wasn't.(The title and quotes, obviously, come fromA Midsummer Night's Dream.)





	written in love's richest books

**Author's Note:**

> (I'm sticking to the TV version of the pairing here, so no extensive backstory this time.)

The play wraps up to the general applause, but that is nowhere near the night’s end. For once, the malicious groans of the ice seem to retreat, if only for the evening, unable to sully the good cheer. Harry likes neither the play, its stuffy brittle language inimical to honesty, nor the drunk carousing, even if he recognizes the necessity, but he is on HMS Erebus now, and hence keeping order here is not, strictly speaking, his duty.

He stands up on tiptoe, scouring the frolicking crowd for the familiar face. The bacchanal shows no signs of winding down, and the crew mess, hastily cleared to make room for the play, descends into joyful racket. Blanky jumps up onto the sail storage bin and toasts to wives and sweethearts, the crew erupting into cheerful yells of “may they never meet.” Someone stops young Hartnell, still dressed as Helena from the play, and pulls up his dress to reveal a frilly underskirt. Bodies bump and wiggle, just this side of propriety: a small sacrifice of decorum meant to release the tension and preserve order.

The mimed impropriety hits too close to home for comfort, chafing the sore spots instead of providing an easy laugh. The cesspool of loves and lusts coming to a boil on the improvised stage is there to show just what he cannot have and shouldn’t want. And yet, when he sees John, still in a dress and with his face still painted, he cannot help but smile and catch his hand, safe in the knowledge that nobody’s paying close attention to their surroundings this late into the night. 

The man freezes, just long enough to spike fear that the paint and the wig made Harry grab for the wrong one, or, what’s even worse, the right, but having completely misread his intentions and his attentions during the short summer weeks on Whale Fish Island, when the crews still mixed liberally, cheerful in their brief idleness before the hardships of the expedition began. That, indeed, would be a muddle worthy of the play he’s just seen, and altogether more disastrous. But after the swiftest of seconds, there’s an answering clasp on his palm, and John–John, undeniably, for there wasn’t a sweeter smile among the two crews and in hundreds miles around them too–breaks into a smile. Relieved, Harry pulls him aft, towards a hatchway to the lower decks.

He looks back quickly over his shoulder while John struggles with the dress, trying to climb down the ladder, the familiar descent made treacherous with the unfamiliar garment. Fortunately, nobody seems to have noticed them slip away from the crowd.

As John almost tumbles down the last couple of steps, Harry remembers a phrase from the night’s play, the formality and quotation marks giving him courage he would not otherwise possess to whisper, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” 

John rewards him with a smile that makes his palms sweat and slip on the ladder’s railing as he hastens to get down himself. He’s been simmering in the soupy stew of unclear desires since summer, imagination supplanting what he lacked in knowledge. His nights in the crowded living space were feverish with images of hands and lips. The moment his feet hit the lower deck, he turns on his heels and, before he has time to think better of it, presses John to the wall. 

He’s not sure what he wants, unless “everything” is answer enough. In the half-darkness lit by nothing but flickers shining from the upper deck, by touch, Harry reaches under the skirt, and John obediently pulls it up and out of the way, as if rendered meek by the garb. He even shuffles his feet farther apart, letting Harry explore: his member just beginning to plump up, and the weight of his balls, and the hard plane of the scrawny arse, incongruous under the softness and ruffles of the feminine clothes. Not that different from his own, Harry tells himself to still the rising fear; nothing he hasn’t handled. The ruckus of the revel is still perfectly audible from the deck above though, so Harry pulls them farther down into the bowels of the ship.

This close to the cast iron furnace, deep in the hold, the air is smouldering. Harry takes a moment to check: the furnace is well-stoked, so they have some time before one of the stokers comes in again. Harry finally turns to John, and closes the distance between them.

The paint that made John’s skin shine alabaster on the stage is revealed for a blotchy concoction of wax and flour from up close. Rivulets of sweat run down his brow, licking through burnt cork lines marking his eyebrows. His mouth tastes sweet with beetroot juice under Harry’s lips, smudging them both red. He is perfect in a way Harry doesn’t have the words to describe, his beauty painful like a fishbone stuck deep in the throat.

Unable to take the sight of his face for much longer, he drops to his knees and puts John's shoe on his shoulder, a soft indoor shoe of his soft indoor creature, indifferent to adventures unless they were contained in a book, and himself as brittle and treasured as printed pages. He lavishes open-mouthed kisses against John’s calf, smudging beetroot juice all over the grey wool of his stockings. The floorboards are hard against his knees, the pain just this side of bearable, but it’s nothing against months upon months of waiting.

Reaching the garter, he pauses, tonguing at the line where coarse itchy fabric meets warm flesh. Pushing it down by a couple of inches, he licks at the red traces marking its earlier position, the hairs on John's legs tickling at his nose.

“I wish we had more time,” John whispers hoarsely, an expression of regret as much as a supplication.

Obediently, Harry reaches up, farther, farther, sucking, then biting at the skin of John’s inner thigh, rewarded by a quiet moan, soon cut off. He smirks proudly, imagining John biting his fist to stay quiet. This makes John drop the dress he held bunched up at his waist, and its folds cover Harry, caging him in the wet heat that smells of wool, mothballs and sweat.

“And what would you do, if we did?” he asks against John’s thigh. 

This, so far, is nothing he couldn't do or hadn’t done with a woman, but next to his cheek, right where, under the circumstances, he’d usually expect to find the soft pliant wetness, is the incontrovertible proof of his love's virility.

“Whatever you like,” John says up above him.

“You,” Harry whispers, mouthing at John’s balls, “I like you.”

He licks and laps; John huffs out a surprised little laugh, then clamps his hand on Harry's shoulder through the fabric of his dress, firmly enough, he’s certain, to leave bruises.

“That, dear Harry, is most fortunate indeed, for I like you too, very much so.”

“Given where I am, I’d be offended if you said otherwise,” Harry chuckles, his nose pressed to the tender skin of John’s scrotum, and recites, the endless play having been good for something at least, "Two lovely berries moulded on one stem."

That earns him a laugh. "That is most certainly not what the bard meant, my dear Harry."

“Could have fooled me,” Harry mutters, working his hand into his breeches to yank at his rock-hard cock.

The stuffy heat under the folds of the dress becomes almost too much when he closes his lips over the tip of John’s cock, especially when he plunges lower, trying to take it in deeper, and almost chokes.

“You don’t have to,” John says, but not without a note of regret, when he comes up for air.

But Harry wants to, and he takes to work again, this time licking at the tip and swirling his tongue around it. The taste is not to his liking, and his knees against the hard floor are giving him grief, but the hitch of John’s breath makes his chest swell with pride, and his own dry palm is almost painful against his prick.

“Faster,” John says, firmly putting a palm on the back of his head.

The command in his tone takes Harry by surprise as much as his own willingness to obey and follow the pressure of the hand pushing him lower. He’s being used as a dockside doxy by a man wearing a decidedly doxyish dress, made to open his mouth wider, and take it, and give pleasure, in which there’s as much joy as in the unthinking relinquishment of responsibility, he is stunned to discover, and his hand on his own prick speeds up quite on its own. When they sail back to England, he knows, the smell of mothballs will never be altogether innocent of the taste of another man’s seed on his tongue, and the rustle of a dress will always bear the promise of a scandal. More banal things lie between his present and the exciting future–the time will soon come for him to don his slops and trudge back to Terror, and for John to doff the dress and wash off the white paste from his face, resuming their daily duties–but for now, he wants this moment to last, if only in his memory. He fumbles with a garter with his free hand and, yanking it off John’s calf, rubs it against his cock. The change in texture makes it easier to pretend that it’s no longer his own hand pleasuring him, and when he spends, he makes sure to catch it in the fabric, to be kept in the inner pocket of his jacket as a memento for the time when ice breaks and there’s no regular traveling between the ships.


End file.
